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Old 01-26-2010, 09:43 PM   #1
Born_In_Xixax
 
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Elephant #2: Team Stacking

2nd on my list of pet peeves surrounding TF-like games (and most multiplayer games out there, period) is the issue of team stacking.

Team stacking of course is when the best players tend to aggregate on a single team, resulting of course in a completely unfair contest and total domination of the opposition. Less common (and less insidious) is when one side or the other ends up with more players numerically (e.g. 6 v 9) and the team with the advantage refuses to even things up.

Now, team stacking is a fully understandable aspect of human nature - I like to win! - and it can be framed in several ways that sound positive:

'I want to play on the same team as my friends'
'I don't want to play with that jerk'
'I prefer to play defense/offense'
'I don't like being on a team with incompetent fools'
'Noo!...auto-teamed to the loser's side!' etc.

However, almost everyone will agree that the end result is harmful in just about every way: it demoralizes the weaker players (who tend to be the newer players we want to encourage,) it spawns DvD/turtling scenarios, it takes any sense of real competition/fun out of the match at hand; it even hurts the stackers, as they are playing weak opponents and so therefore are not playing to their full potential.

I think it would be a useful exercise to discuss the pros/cons of allowing completely free choice of teams at all times, and to consider enforcing some team-leveling mechanics via server-side scripts or in some other way.

- I played on many TF2 servers that would auto-level teams (numerically) periodically, and that seemed to work well without many complaints. Does that exist for FF already?
- Why not force auto team choice upon joining the server, or on new maps?
- How about disabling team switching unless a numerical discrepancy exists?
- How about auto-leveling teams based on average player FF points? Only on map change? Every 10 minutes during play..?
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Old 01-27-2010, 12:21 PM   #2
zE
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Born_In_Xixax View Post
- How about disabling team switching unless a numerical discrepancy exists?
- How about auto-leveling teams based on average player FF points? Only on map change? Every 10 minutes during play..?
I kinda agree with u : )
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Old 01-27-2010, 10:07 PM   #3
Gwarsbane
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Auto team balance has been suggested many many times, and it has even been tried a few times, but the plugin always messed up the server.

Last I heard the FF devs were working on something for a future patch that would do something like was suggested. It would auto join someone to a team as they come in. If there was more people on blue you could not join blue. If there was more people on read you could not join red.

It would go for either joining up or even if you are already on a team.

A warning message that would pop up when the teams are uneven by 2 or more people would also be nice.


As for team stacking, I know some have suggested that a few times when their team was badly loosing in FF. When I looked, there was quite a number of good players on the loosing team so my guess would be that it was just an off night for those players and in general I would think thats how it is on most servers for most games.

I've seen most of the same team kick butt when the map switches so agian maybe for the most part its just a bad luck night for them.
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Old 01-28-2010, 12:36 AM   #4
chilledsanity
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In Quake Wars when teams are stacked, they offer to give players experience points to switch. Unlike fortress points, those have more tangible use, but maybe something similar could work.
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Old 01-29-2010, 06:07 AM   #5
eomoyaff
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Team Stacking makes Fortress Forever cry ;_;. I mean you know if your good or not. And usually you know when your good or not knowing how good or not good your teammates are. From there, you make an assessment. "My team is made up of pro's and the other needs help." *Switches Team*. Perhaps trade players around. Regardless, you know how good your team is within the first minute of the game and you should be able to register fairness. But this all blends right back into the learning curve. If players took the time to learn a lot of the things that experienced players had, then this wouldn't be as big a problem.
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Old 02-06-2010, 05:41 AM   #6
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Haha, I always switch to the shittier team. Maybe I'm just dragging them down but I prefer to think I'm evening things up a bit. There's also less competition for kills on the worse team.

I think most of the time that team stacking occurs for entirely innocent reasons, as Xixax suggested. Sometimes auto-team just puts a great player on the team that's already winning, and switching to the other team means he has to play a role he's not interested in at the moment. There are lots of players who are major enthusiasts or a single class or maybe two, and it just so happens that that class adds a 4th Engineer to a defending team, or a 3rd HWGuy, or whatever. This also gets back to the discussion about why DvD happens.

However, this all seems like a server issue to me, not a game issue. I see this kind of thing regulated with server scripts all the time. I seem to recall a server where there was a flagged phrase like !scramble, where if enough people called for it (like rtv) it would randomize the teams. This kind of thing helps, if its set so that the stacked team's votes aren't needed to make it happen. Not allowing a player to switch to a team with a player advantage is a no-brainer, or at least, controlling the size of the player advantage.

Interrelated with DvD is the red is defense blue is offense problem. If everyone loves defense everyone goes red, team is stacked.
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